Late in 2020 Redhat made its first attempt to kill CentOS. Then came the heroic rescue of Alma and Rocky distros. Now just last month, June 2023, Redhat is attempting to kill these “downstream distros.” They – wrongly, I might add – assert “recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.”

We could argue with redhat or just move on. There are other distros. But the tragedy here is that redhat is missing the entire point of open source. Everyone contributing anything that worked on CentOS was bolstering Redhat’s offering. It is arrogant for anyone, Redhat included, to view the community as a bunch of freeloaders. Opensource isn’t narrowly defined as sharing of code – it is a community of sharing. In that light Redhat is saying they are done sharing. So they are done with open source. So I am done with them. Time to move on.

The only question now is which distro will be used next. In the past I’ve avoided other distros because there was simply no compelling reason to switch. There is now a reason to switch. Perhaps Ubuntu or Debian? Arch?

Goodbye Redhat – have a good time sliding further into irrelevance.